Little Monkey
by AndromedaStarr
Summary: How would Random have turned out if she'd been left with Zaphod as a child? Would she still be the terminally depressed girl we know? There might be some ZaphodRandom in later chapters...read and review!
1. Chapter 1

A/U. Ever wondered how Random would have turned out if Trillian had left her with Zaphod when she was a baby instead of waiting until later to leave her with Arthur? Maybe Zaphod/Random in later chapters. I haven't decided yet. What? Don't look at me like that, it'll be better than you think.

* * *

The Heart of Gold was a wholly remarkable ship, powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive and virtually the most astonishing and brain-wrenching thing ever designed. This heartbreakingly beautiful, stunningly useful and incredibly inexplicable ship was also, to the great dismay of everybody in the Universe with more than two brain cells, currently in the hands of Zaphod Beeblebrox. That he had become President of the Imperial Galactic Government had surprised no one; that he had become President of the Imperial Galactic Government in order to steal the starship Heart of Gold...

Well, there are some people who haven't quite come around yet.

Trillian was heading up to the bridge, Random in her arms. The child should have been weeks old but was instead closer to a year – a side-effect of leaving her in day-care time zones. They were notoriously unreliable, but carting Random around to cover wars and such like wasn't feasible anymore. She had to do something.

So she had come back to the Heart of Gold, and what she was going to do was to leave Random there. Zaphod would take care of her – he found the 'little monkey' endlessly amusing but thought it a shame she only had the one head. Trillian couldn't even remember why she'd wanted a child in the first place. Random cried, screamed and threw things. Trillian wasn't sure what she'd expected, but it hadn't been the persistently unhappy child she'd gotten stuck with.

"Zaphod?" she called, entering the bridge. Lots of white, lots of shiny consoles. Just as she remembered it. But no Zaphod. Quickly she set Random down on the white leather couch in front of the wide-screen television. She debated on whether or not to leave a note and decided it didn't matter. Zaphod probably wouldn't read it anyway.

Trillian turned, walking swiftly down the corridor to the entry bay. She felt mildly guilty for what she was doing, but still, she hadn't asked for the gloomy, depressed child that Random was turning out to be. She had a promising career and her future, all in all, was looking pretty zarking good.

She could be something. Without Random.


	2. Chapter 2

Zaphod had just stepped out of the bathroom and was somehow contriving to towel-dry both his heads at the same time when Eddie said, "Hi there! I just thought you'd like to know that while you were in the shower, you had a visitor!"

Zaphod nearly dropped both towels. "Hey, yeah? Who?"

"Trillian Astra, the reporter from Sub-Etha broadcasting network –"

"_What?_" Now Zaphod did drop the towels. "Trillian? She was here?"

"Sure was," the computer chirped merrily. "Told me not to tell you."

Zaphod thought about this as he proceeded to his cabin to try to make sense of his clothes. "She say anything, leave anything?"

"She sure did," Eddie said. "It's on the bridge. Better hurry up, it's starting to make a fuss."

Zaphod took the stairs two at a time, and then, as he neared the top, three at a time, which had the cumulative effect of making him trip and fall headlong. He broke his fall with his third arm, straightened up, dusted off his black pants, and crested the stairs. What he saw nearly made him fall right back down them.

A child was lying on the floor. A very small, very human child.

And it was crying.

Zaphod managed to regain his balance and hurtled toward the squalling little animal. He dropped into a crouch over it, and was surprised to recognize the red face. "What the zarking photon..." Gingerly, he lifted the child. "Computer!"

"Right here and always glad to help!" replied the computer in that annoying voice that had always made Zaphod want to put his fist through its circuits.

"I want you to do something for me and I want you to be quick about it." Zaphod tried to hush the child. Random was surprisingly loud for such a small child – but small or not, he was alarmed at how fast she'd grown. But then, he figured, that was bound to happen one way or the other when you kept shipping your kid off to time zone day-care.

"I want you," Zaphod said, and both heads were beginning to throb, "to scour any and every database available to you and give me everything you've got on how to handle a human kid."


	3. Chapter 3

Some three hours later, Random was still crying and Zaphod had no idea what he was doing wrong. The shipboard computer had been utterly unable to give him any information of use and had turned itself off in a huff of self-frustration, something for which Zaphod couldn't help but be thankful. "Zarquon!" he muttered, and then, to try to calm himself, began to hum an old Betelgeusian drinking song. As soon as he'd started, though, he stopped. Random was quiet.

Huge brown eyes stared up at him, and he couldn't help but think that even though humans were weird for having live young, this one was kind of cute. He had no sooner thought this, however, than she began to scream again.

Zaphod sighed in frustration, and then slapped both his foreheads without dropping Random in realization of what it was that had made her stop crying. He hummed another couple bars of the song, and the noise abruptly shut off. Random was looking up at him with wide, wondering eyes, and a queer little smile that reminded him oddly of himself.

"Hey, I get it," he said softly, and as tunefully as he could. "I gotta sing to you, little monkey."

He sat back in the couch, rearranging her so her head was on his shoulder, and kept humming. When he finished that drinking song, he hummed another drinking song. When those were done, he proceeded to all the battle hymns he could remember, and thence to the funeral dirges of his birthplace. After that, he couldn't think of any more songs, so he made up something interminable on the spot and hummed that until his voice went.

In retrospect, he needn't have bothered, because Random, where she lay on Zaphod's shoulder, was asleep.

* * *

She really wasn't so bad, Zaphod thought as he cradled the sleeping child in his arms. She looked more like Trillian; she had Trillian's odd little nose, her dark hair and her brown eyes. But, like Arthur, there was something awkward about her, something that suggested her features didn't come together exactly as they should. In fact they fitted very well, but something suggested they might have fit better.

Zaphod had never found Arthur's inelegance particularly bothersome, he had just become very worried about the human's burning desire to state and restate incredibly obvious facts. Which meant that conversations with Arthur inevitably turned into constant repetition of any one of several phrases. "What?", "I don't understand," and "We're going to die," generally ended up being the ones used most often.

Random...well, hopefully Random would not be a Dent.

He settled her into the couch, and pulled a couple chairs against it so she couldn't roll off and fall. He had just breathed a sigh of relief when Eddie said, "Hey there! I'm just about delighted to tell you that there is a very large ship approaching us! They're sending us a message!"

The screen flashed, and a mind-bogglingly weird alien appeared. It had a very small head covered in spiky orange fur, a massively huge body, and approximately fifty or sixty eyes scattered about. It had four legs which bent the wrong direction, a whippy little tail with no apparent function and a mouth, located smack in the middle of its chest, that appeared to be full of someone else's teeth. Zaphod thought he would go mad just looking at it.

"Zaphod Beeblebrox," it said in a lispy, snarly English accent. "You have been tried by the Intergalactic High Council and found guilty. Your punishment is immediate dismemberment. Please make no effort to escape while I attempt to make contact with the rest of my crew."

"Eddie," Zaphod murmured out of the corner of one of his mouths, "do we have normality yet?"

"Nope!" the computer responded happily.

Less than three seconds later Zaphod had sprinted across the room to the most important console on the entire ship and slammed his hand down on the big button.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: ShadowValkyrie, thank you muchly for the review. I'm not fond of children myself, which is why Random does indeed grow up quickly, lol. And I'm inclined to agree in that the only reason Zaphod probably hung on to the little twerp is that he was curious to see what human children are like. I think, in fact, that she grows up so quickly he doesn't have a chance to lose interest.

* * *

It is a well known fact that turning on the Improbability Drive without first activating the proofing screens is of course terrible thinking. The probability that something drastic will happen and that things will go spectacularly wrong is much higher than the probability that everything will go wonderfully according to plan. But then, when one is faced with a Spheltmongle battle cruiser, and the Spheltmongle in the cockpit happens to be the Imperiously Scarred Brindlewurdle, one _does_ have very little alternative.

Zaphod found himself precisely where he had been standing. A quick glance down assured him that he was his usual two-headed, three-armed self, only dressed in tight leather pants, a shimmering gold shirt and a floor-length red velvet coat. Which wasn't at all a bad look, he thought.

"Computer," he said. "Where are we?"

"Why, right where we were!" it responded enthusiastically, and proceeded to rattle off the coordinates. Yep, right where they had been.

The Heart of Gold now looked like the inside of a fantastically designed nightclub. Flashing disco lights illuminated the consoles, the floor was tiled in something ultra-shiny and opalescent, and there was loud and repetitive but wildly fun music blasting from gigantic speakers where the plants had been. There was a bar in one corner, a long, curved piece of black marble with lots of gold trimming and bottles of vastly expensive alcohols magnetically held to the top.

Zaphod, who had been admiring the interior, blinked suddenly. _Random._ With any luck she'd be precisely as she was, otherwise if and when Trillian came back for her, he was bound to find himself in shit. He ran over to the couch, rather enjoying the feel of the coat billowing behind him. All thought and emotion halted in his brains, however, when he saw what was lying sleeping on the couch.

Less than half a second ago, Random had been almost a year old, she'd measured thirty-one inches and weighed nineteen pounds. Now, half a second later, Random looked to be about twenty. If Zaphod had checked, he would have discovered that she measured five feet eight inches from end to end and weighed approximately one hundred and thirty-nine pounds.

Zaphod, of course, could not do any of this because he had fainted.

* * *

Upon coming back to his senses a short time later, Zaphod chewed meditatively on a thumbnail, downed half a bottle of Arcturan Firewhiskey and began to wonder how he was going to explain this to Trillian. Once he'd started that, however, he decided he needed a few more drinks, and so he got up to fetch himself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Once he'd gotten up, however, he decided that what he really needed was to sit right back down and stare.

Random was standing in the doorway. She was swaying a little, as though unused to her sudden change in size. "What," she said, and stopped. "What..." She tilted her head and suddenly seemed to find a word to connect 'what' with. "What happened?"

"I turned on the Infinite Improbability Drive without first activating the proofing screens," Zaphod said. "It was to escape from a bunch of Spheltmongles."

"Oh," Random said, and swayed a bit more. "Well, that's all right, then."

Zaphod blinked uncertainly. "Do you want a drink?"

"Yes," she said. "Drink. Yes, I want a drink."

Zaphod got up, stumbled over a particularly bothersome draught of air, and managed to stay on his feet long enough to mix a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster for each of them. Then he slumped back onto the stool.

Random was holding her hands up to the light. "Was I always this big?" she asked, squinting. "I seem to remember myself being a bit...smaller. Maybe I just think I'm remembering it. Or maybe I'm supposed to think that I'm thinking I remembered it."

Zaphod swallowed half the drink in one gulp and reflexively banged a head into the tabletop a couple of times. When he had recovered, he said, "You grew. Very fast. I didn't mean it."

"Hmm," Random said reflectively. She was a nice-looking girl for all her obvious awkwardness. She staggered rather than walked, and there was something a bit vague in her eyes, but she had turned out more like Trillian. She picked up the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and gave it a long, probing look. "What is this?"

"The best zink in eggdristence," Zaphod said, and swept the pieces of his mangled speech into some sort of formless instruction on how to actually mix one.

Random looked at him. "Are you drunk?"

"No," he said truthfully. He wasn't. He wasn't drunk at all; he merely wanted to scream. A moment ago this girl had been a child, he had conspired to carve up his own brain and couldn't remember why, suddenly there were space pirates working for the Imperial Galactic Government and apparently he'd been tried for something he didn't even know he'd done. Zaphod just couldn't understand anything anymore; he wasn't even sure his life had a point.

"Oh." She shrugged. "Okay," she said, and tilting back her head, poured the contents of the glass right down her throat.

The next thing she did was let out a wild whoop in major thirds. The next thing she did after that was slide gracelessly off the stool into a puddle of twitching muscles. Several minutes later, she rose to her feet and set the glass back on the table with fingers that leapt and flexed without consulting her brain.

"Er," she managed, and disappeared again.

"Like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick?" Zaphod questioned helpfully, leaning across the counter to see whether she was having a good time on the floor again.

"Bleargh," Random agreed, getting back on her stool for the second time. "Why do you drink it?"

Zaphod stared. "Because it's like having your brain smashed out by a –"

"Ah," she said, and held up a hand. "I think I get it."

"No," Zaphod said. "I'm not entirely sure you do." He finished his drink and stared morosely at the glass. "Actually, I'm not entirely sure I do."

Random peered at him as though she couldn't quite understand what he was made from. "Are you my mother?"

"No. Your mother's, ah, well, I don't know where she is."

She nodded like she understood which she obviously didn't. "Are you my father, then?"

Zaphod had been asked that question quite a few times by quite a few people and he had always had to do some swift arithmetic in his head before he could answer with any degree of certainty. This time, however, he knew for certain that he wasn't. "Nope. Different species."

Random nodded and held out her empty glass. "Do you have any more of this?"

"I thought," he started, and then stopped because he knew that the last thing he wanted to do was think. Wordlessly he poured another Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster for her, and one for him as well. Maybe it was better not to think for a while. After all, he didn't want to destroy the few working brain cells he had left. "So where do you want to go?"

"Hmm?" Random looked up from where she was sprawled on the bar. Her glass was empty again, and she was a mess of involuntary movements. "What do you mean?"

"We're on a spaceship," Zaphod said patiently. "We can go anywhere. Think of a number."

Random stared, and he refrained from saying something snarky to the effect that she was just like her father. "A number?"

"Any number." He waited, drumming his hands on his thighs and gripping the tabletop with the third. "Come on, it's just a number!"

"Eight billion, six hundred and eighty-six million, five hundred and seventy-nine thousand, three hundred and fifty-one," she said calmly.

Zaphod tossed back his drink. "Computer!" he said when he could speak again. "Do it!"

There was a flash of darkness, and suddenly there was light.


	5. Chapter 5

"Computer," Zaphod said groggily, struggling to his feet. "Where are we?"

"Feller, I am really pleased to tell you that we are currently in orbit around the planet Allosimanius Syneca!" Eddie reported cheerfully, and a view of the planet appeared on the screen.

Zaphod looked at Random, who shrugged. "Never heard of it," she said. "Looks nice, though."

'Nice' is perhaps too gentle a word for the planet Allosimanius Syneca. It is noted for ice, snow, mind-hurtling beauty and stunning cold, and the view from the top of the Ice Crystal Pyramids of Sastanua is widely known for its ability to release the observer's mind to hitherto unexperienced horizons of beauty. From space, it looked very pretty and very white, and, Zaphod thought, vaguely familiar.

"Dress warm, baby," he said.

* * *

Several minutes later they were in a small white pod that Zaphod was piloting very badly indeed, racing through the atmosphere of the pretty white planet in vast, arcing swoops. Random, who was wearing far too many layers of clothes, looked wide-eyed and curious. "So, monkey –"

"My name is Random," she said without any acidity at all. "Just thought you should know that."

"Random. Right." Zaphod tried to remember what he'd been going to say and couldn't. "So what do you know?"

"Hmm?"

"What do you know?" he repeated. "Do you know about planets and species and parties and that kind of thing?"

She looked thoughtful. "I think so. I've read the Guide, you know. Sometime. Probably while you were being improbable. Time went very quickly for me, but not as quickly as it did for you. I had time to read most of the Guide as I was growing up."

"Goosnargh," Zaphod said, and the little pod gave a vertiginous tilt and zoomed toward the ground at an impossible angle.

"What do you know?" she asked him, and here Zaphod found himself in a bit of a problem.

"A lot," he said with economical truthfulness, leveling off so that they were now flying about twenty feet above the gentle slope of a startlingly white snowfield. "I'm President of the Imperial Galactic Government, you know."

"That must be nice," Random said, and all at once they had passed the snowfield and were dodging trees in an unreasonably thick forest. Brilliant yellow light was barely visible through the gaps as they twisted and turned, and then they burst out into the open, which was a beautifully white and pristine expanse of sheer flat ice. A deft spin to the right and once they had passed a few rocks, they found a fairly large, deep blue pool of lightly steaming water. Two full glasses sat quietly on a small flat rock nearby.

The pod screeched to a halt. "This," Zaphod said reverently, "is zarking awesome."

* * *

Zaphod spread two arms along the rock and sighed happily. With his third arm, he plucked a glass of something indefinable and oddly purple from the flat-topped rock, which constantly produced fantastic drinks at the whim of whoever was in the pool. He tasted it and sighed again. Phyrxian brandy. Hell yes.

Random, where she sat on the ledge across from him, the water up to her shoulders, seemed to be dozing. A curl of wet dark hair lay against her cheek. The water was hot, and she was sweating lightly.

Zaphod consulted his morals on whether it would be wrong to hit on her, seeing as she was Trillian's daughter and all. His morals were silent. Suspiciously silent, he thought, until he remembered that they didn't exist. Satisfied that the way was clear, he sat back comfortably, sipping the brandy and thoroughly enjoying the feel of the small wisps of smoke that trailed from his ears.

"Where are we again?" Random asked without opening her eyes.

"Allosimanius Syneca," he answered, cocking one head slightly to see if she looked better from that angle. She did.

"Mm." She shifted, opened her eyes and caught him staring. "What?"

"Oh, nothing. Want a drink?" He nodded with his rightmost head to the rock.

"Sure," she said, and swam across the pool. No sooner had she touched the rock than a tall, frosted glass of a ridiculously pink drink appeared. "What is this?"

"Whatever you wanted." Zaphod took a sip and felt an altogether too pleasant warmth flood his body. "Oh. This is Santraginean liquor. Santraginus X, specifically."

Random looked interested. "What does it do?" she said, taking the glass and accepting a seat on the ledge next to him.

Zaphod twitched uneasily and debated how he was going to answer that.


	6. Chapter 6

The Guide has this to say on the subject of Santraginean liquor:

Santraginean liquor, it says, is one of the most mind-boggling liquids ever, and should absolutely never ever be consumed in spite of the fact that it is the most spectacularly wonderful drink ever. It tastes like heaven, yes, but it comes with several side-effects. Scientists and partygoers far and wide have searched every known corner of the Universe for an antidote to the consequences of consumption of Santraginean liquor, but to no avail.

The instantaneous effect of drinking Santraginean liquor is a very titillating warmth throughout the body. Several minutes after the first drop, this warmth will center in the drinker's erogenous zones, at which point the aphrodisiac powers of the liquor will become immediately apparent and the drinker will attempt sexual congress with anything with a heartbeat within a radius of five miles.

This, however, is an unimportant occurrence.

The real pain in the neck is the fact that Santraginean liquor wreaks all sorts of havoc with the fiddly bits of the brain that produce serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and all the other friendly little brain chemicals called endorphins. The practical upshot of all of this is that, in a nutshell, it causes you to fall in love.


End file.
